Returning to a legendary ship

“At night I’ve lain awake thinking about it,” Herbert Alberg, 97, said. “If I had a bucket list, it’d be on the bucket list.”

Alberg served on the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier, in 1946, when he was 18. Last weekend, he stepped aboard the ship, which is now a museum in San Diego, for the first time in 77 years. He reminisced, and donated one-of-a-kind photos he took secretly while aboard the ship, as well as other items, to the museum. He also met up with other World War II veterans and answered museum guests’ questions.

Preparing for his flight from New York, Alberg packed a suitcase in his Oceanside home with, among other things, pictures of icebergs, enlisted men plowing snow off the Midway’s flight deck, sailors sunbathing in Guantanamo Bay, and Cuba. Each photo brought back memories of his time aboard the Midway as a radar man in the Combat Information Center.

The photos were taken with a German bellows camera, a gift from his brother, who served in the war.

“It was so long ago, and I was so young,” Alberg said. He was encouraged to join the Navy by his older brother, who took part in the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily and France. Herbert went to the enlistment office with his father, who signed off on the 17½-year-old’s paperwork. He got his orders for Christmas 1944, left Middle Village, Queens, and turned 18 in boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in 1945.

“They asked what kind of ship I’d like to be on, and I said a destroyer,” he said. “I picked a destroyer because my cousin, who was six months older than me, joined the Navy, and he was a radar man, so I thought I’d keep it in the family. Instead they assigned me to the . . . Midway, which had not been commissioned yet.”

Alberg said he was fortunate to be assigned to the battlecarrier, which was America’s largest naval vessel for 10 years and couldn’t fit through the Panama Canal. The ship was also a prototype of sorts, with a new state-of-the-art steel deck, which offered more protection against bombs dropped by kamikaze pilots. Before the switch, they easily broke through the wooden decks into the bowels of a ship.

Part of the first crew to shove out, Alberg who was a radar man, is considered a “plank owner.” On board he monitored three types of radar, he said, as part of Operation Frostbite. As the Cold War was beginning, America’s military noticed, “that the Russians had ports in cold-weather areas,” Alberg said. “We never had it, so the admirals said we have to learn how to operate in cold weather.” The Midway, packed with 4,500 crew members, was flanked by three destroyers as it cruised toward the Arctic Circle.

“This one day, it was really bad weather,” Alberg recounted, “and we were rolling. They said at that time it was like a 90-degree pitch, which was unheard of with a carrier. I opened up the hatch and all you see is water, which is not a good sign.” Sailors called it “green water” when waves broke on the flight deck, 50 feet above sea level. It was “one of the times I was frightened,” Alberg said.

One of the photos he gave to the museum captured one of those monster waves breaking on a nearby destroyer. Alberg titled the picture “rough waters.” “I don’t think the enlisted people were allowed to take pictures, so I had to sneak,” he said, “They sold film on the ship, but I never bought any.”

Alberg looks back at his year on the ship as simply doing his duty. “You’ve got a job to do,” he said. He was discharged July 2, 1946, and stayed at the Lido Beach Hotel. After getting married, he moved out to “greener pastures,” in Oceanside, he said.

He went to technical school, studied structural technology and worked as a surveyor until he got a job on Governors Island. There he worked as a post engineer for the U.S. Army, doing  island maintenance for 37 years.

“I can’t remember all of the things that happened there, but it was surely an experience working there,” he said, adding he remembers President Ronald Reagan’s visit to the island to get a view of the Statue of Liberty while it was undergoing renovations. He reluctantly retired at age 80.

As he prepared for his visit to the Midway last weekend, Alberg speculated that he would “probably be one of the oldest of the original crew to come aboard.”

“It was wonderful to have Herb back on his ship after all these years,” said Jim Reily, the USS Midway Museum’s director of docents and the ship’s supply officer from 1989 to 1991, who spent the day with Alberg. “It was a joy to be able to show him around. Once you’ve served on Midway, no matter how long ago, you’re a Midway sailor for life.”